Stuff You Should Know - How Bioarchaeology Works

Episode Date: August 10, 2017

Thanks to advancements in fields like genetics, and molecular chemistry, archaeology is undergoing a renaissance and opening up new understanding of the past. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry, so it's Stuff You Should Know.

And we're doing one of my favorite things, Chuck. What's that? Archaeology. Yeah, we've done a few of these over the years. Yes, specifically one called Archaeology and a Nutshell, which was mostly about archaeology. Yeah, and boy, it's hard to find an archaeology article on the internet that doesn't mention Indiana Jones.

I'll just say that. Including this one from Stuff You Should Know or from HowStuffWorks. That was the one, two, third and fourth word in this article. Yep. Forget the Indiana Jones fedora. Yeah, but you know what? Like, no pun intended, hats off to that character for,

I mean, that character has done so much for the field of archaeology, just by existing, you know? Yeah, for sure. It definitely opened my eyes. Archaeology was one of the first complicated words I could spell as a youngster. Yeah, I bet you. Thanks to Indiana Jones.

I bet 95% of archaeologists between the ages of 30 and 55 are there because of Indiana Jones. Right, and you can usually pick them up because they tend to dress like him as well. You really don't need a whip. No, I don't need it. Right. I want it.

You never know. Yeah, but yeah, he represents though this kind of, well, he represents a type of archaeologist that never actually existed, you know, pulp fiction kind of archaeologists from the 1930s adventures, right? Yeah. So that didn't actually, Indiana Jones and his ilk didn't ever really exist,

but he also kind of represents this type of archaeology that has become old school for sure and is starting to be replaced. I was gonna say slowly being replaced, but I get the impression that it's fairly quickly being replaced by this kind of new method, these new techniques that put together all fall under the name of bioarchaeology.

Right, which is a sub-genre, not genre, but sub-specialty, sub-field. There's a word I'm looking for, I can't find it. I think subspecialty works, or specialty. Yeah, it is a specialty, but I can't, I can't. A sub-umbrella of the umbrella term, a sub-brella. Man, it's gonna bug me, I'll think of it later. So anyway, we're talking about the combining

of a lot of different disciplines in archaeology, and they all have great long names like paleo demography, just studying ancient populations, the demographics of those, paleogenetics, which is a big deal as you will see, DNA, scraping some old teeth, you know, finding out what's going on there. Yeah.

Mortuary studies, which, that's the best way to get a date in college, if you say you're minoring in mortuary studies. Right. What else? Well, basically anything where you can apply new scientific techniques to the study of bones in particular, that kind of, yeah,

that kind of lends itself to being called bioarchaeology. But the field, this little thing that started out, I think, is kind of a fairly specialized sub-discipline of archaeology. That's the word, sub-discipline. I think I suggested that, didn't I? No, I don't think so. It's starting to replace archaeology as a whole

from what I can see from the outside looking in. It's becoming archaeology. Exactly, it's replacing some of these old techniques with these new techniques. It's kind of a technocratic approach to archaeology. And the best practices they're coming up with are so good that they're kind of undoing old archaeology. And so this specialized field is kind of taking

over the field as a whole. And it seems to be the way that archaeology is going. And one of the reasons, just, initially, it was just like dig up the bones and try to read them in even better ways than the old style of archaeology did. But as it's growing as a field or as a sub-discipline, it's starting to try to answer bigger and bigger questions

about the people that are being dug up and the populations that they belong to. Yeah, kind of putting it in a historic context and not just, let me look at this one set of bones and what this says about this person. But like you said, they're trying to almost reconstruct societies as a whole and social strata and what they ate and what kind of things killed them

and whether or not they accepted outsiders. Like it's really kind of neat. It really is. I like it. And plus, I mean, this is stuff that archaeology, I guess you could call it old school archaeology, concerned itself with as well. But I get the impression that the old school archaeology

was not rooted enough in science. So they were at risk of making grand pronouncements that were not necessarily correct. So you just have limited evidence like this one skeleton or maybe one burial area. And just from a few things that were basically based on observation, just like visual observation,

you would make these extrapolating, you would extrapolate onto the population as a whole and you could get that wrong really easily. So what bioarchaeology does is the same thing, you still bury up dead bodies, you surmise things from the way that they were situated, the stuff they were buried with and all that. But then you also apply scientific investigation

like genetics and like using mass spectrometers to isolate isotopes in bones. And then you take that evidence and you apply it to the visual observations you've made and you get a clearer picture and you're at less risk of getting it wrong, I think. That's why it's becoming archaeology. Yeah, and we'll probably talk about this

a little more later on, but one of the things I thought was really neat about this is they make the point in our article here that history is written by historians. So you often just get stories or the history of the more important people. And they even quoted a bioarchaeologist in here that says that their goal is to kind of work

from the bottom up and to find out what was going on with some of these marginalized people in society or at the very least, society's a whole and not just, you know, let's dig up King Tut's tomb, which is great, but who worked on King Tut's tomb? Like that's interesting. Exactly, yeah. And so that's basically what's called diplomatic

or great man histiography. I love it. Which is the study of, well, that's just digging up King Tut and focusing on him and leaders and rulers. And that's based on the idea that they're the ones who really push society forward or in whatever direction it went. Don't love it.

It was on the rulers. And that's the way that it's been. Like that's kind of the Western white patriarchal approach to studying history. What you love and what bioarchaeology is tasked itself with is called history from below. Which is like you said, it's sussing out the common people's lives

and figuring out society from there. And one of the neat things about that Chuck is it, like imagine if you're just part of a marginalized group today, and you find out from some archeologists down the road or some historians down the road that actually the group that you're a part of did some really amazing things in this one civilization

at this one period in time, that's inspiring. That can inspire people alive today to do great things with their own lives based on, finding out some neat stuff about their ancestry that would have otherwise been overlooked if their ancestry had never been part of the leadership of a society. Yeah.

So there's a lot of value to it. Yeah, and the term itself, you're more likely at least at this point, and I think you're right, it is changing. To hear it in America, even though it was first used by a British archeologist named Sir John Graham Douglas Clark, great British name, in the 1970s, but an American anthropologist named Jane Ellen Buxtra. That's as good as I could have done.

Buxtra, B-U-I-K-S-T-R-A. She's the one who kind of popularized it, and Americans kind of picked up on the term a little more, at least at this point. You're not as likely to hear it in Europe right now. Right, well, we're just gonna call her Jane Ellen. Okay. Jane Ellen, she was an anthropologist,

and she basically took that term bioarchaeology and basically said it was the integration of archeology and human osteology, which is the study of human bones and what they can tell us, put together to investigate biocultural change. That was her definition of bioarchaeology, and she came up with it in 1977, and that really kind of is the definition

for the field today. Yeah, she was awesome, actually. I looked into her a little bit. Did she wear a pith helmet, too? We, she's probably been a pith-er at some point. Sure. I had a dude write in, actually, that was a fellow pith-er.

Nice, I saw a couple of people on Twitter saying, like, I had to go look this up, but this is what you're wearing in the pool? Well, I mean, there, to be fair, there are the British soldier type tall pith helmets. With the red feather? Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the low safari type

that provides the coverage. That's precisely what I assumed you were talking about. Yeah, it'd be just weird to wear the tall one. It's totally normal to wear the other one in a swimming pool. That's right. But yeah, this guy was a mail carrier, so. Oh, yeah, it seems like that might be standard issue

for the post office now that you mentioned it. I've seen him before. I have, too. For the walkers, at least. Yep, the walkers, the undead ones. All right, well, I think we should already take a break since we've provided such a nice, broad overview. Gosh.

That's all right. Sure. And we'll come back and talk more and more about Bones and Poop. All right. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll

be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, so we promised talk of Bones and Poop. We'll deal with Bones first. And Bones, most times, unless like recently, when they found a, did you hear like just a couple of days ago, they found this couple from World War II frozen in the Swiss Alps. Yes. And, OK, so this couple, it's so tragic, right? It is.

They had tons of kids that were at home. The mom finally, the dad used to go hiking in the mountains all the time. The mom finally went with them for the first time, and they get lost and they fall into a crevasse and are lost for 70 years. Yeah, it was so bad. Never heard from them again.

Yeah. And the reason why she never went with them before, with her husband before, was because she was pregnant all the time. Yeah. So she reared a bunch of kids, fell into a crevasse, died, was lost for 70 years, and then was found again by a ski lift company.

Can you imagine coming across something like that? It'd be grisly. In World War II outfits, I mean, uniform, obviously, but period, era, clothing. Yeah. Man. So anyway, barring something like that, generally, what you're going to be left with when people die,

that flesh goes away very quickly, and as far as in a relative sense. And you're going to be left with bones, these skeletons. They're very durable. They're very hard. And they last a very long time. So the best evidence that bioarchaeologists work with, for the most part, are bones and teeth.

Right, because like you said, they last a very, very long time. And there's actually quite a bit you can tell from those things. Sure. In fact, I saw an explanation of bioarchaeology, because it's such an evolving field still, Chuck, that the definition, even though Jane Ellen's definition holds pretty well, it's just not set in stone. No one says, this is the definition, right?

Right. So one explanation for bioarchaeology I saw said that as a discipline, it views the skeleton as a form of material culture crafted through lived experience. Whoa, that's deep. So the skeleton itself has the markers of all these different things that this person did

in their lifetime, had done to them in their lifetime, like say an infliction of violence, suffered from in their lifetime like a disease, ate in their lifetime. How hard they worked? Yeah, all of this stuff is left behind in your bones. And we've just recently really figured out how to read this beyond looking at it

and visually inspecting it. We've learned how to apply scientific tools like DNA analysis to glean more information from them. Yeah, it's really neat. Did these people, it really puts a more broad human aspect to it all, I think. Yeah, for sure. Like did these people suffer as a society?

Did they thrive? Were they healthy? Were they sick? What did they overcome? What was their environment like? Was it social upheaval that brought them down? Or was it a large wave? Or was it a disease from eating the wrong thing?

Right. It's really interesting. I know a couple of, I think it was in 2014. I believe we talked about this on some show, but it might have even been an internet roundup, but they discovered the oldest human poop, 50,000-year-old Neanderthal poop. And they found out that it was a bit of a surprise

that they ate a lot of vegetables. Yeah, I saw this documentary recently called What the Health, I think, is what it was called, is on Netflix or whatever. So clever. Right. But there's an ongoing discussion in it about whether humans are actually herbivores or omnivores.

Yeah, it was a bit of a surprise, because they thought that Neanderthals, I think it's Tals, right? I say Tals, but I think it is supposed to be Tals, I don't know. Well, that they ate largely only meat, and then they found that, no, it's called coprolite, these fossil feces.

Right. They did eat a lot of meat, obviously, but they were eating, and they couldn't tell from the chemistry analysis of the poop itself, but they did pollen analysis of the area and found that they were eating like berries and nuts and tubers.

And it just, you know, overall just gives kind of a more complete picture of something like you were talking about earlier, they previously were like, no, all they did was eat meat. Well, yeah, plus also, I mean, think about it. So there's this whole idea that all of the megafauna in North America collapsed like around 12,000 years ago,

and humans get blamed for it, like we over-hunted the megafauna. Well, if we find evidence down the road through bioarchaeology that no, actually most of the ancestors who made it to North America and were living here 12,000 years ago were vegetarians for the most part, they probably didn't over-hunt and drive to extinction,

the megafauna, it was probably something else that did it. And so, you know, laying it at the feet of these early humans has been kind of a cautionary tale, like look what happened, you can lead to environmental collapse if you don't manage the wildlife correctly, but if that's not actually true, and we find out what did lead to the collapse

of the megafauna, then maybe we can protect against that instead. You know what I mean? And just forget the rest of wildlife. Yeah, you can over-hunt all you want. Well, it's definitely calling into question a lot of things that we took for granted because of, oh, it just sort of limited science,

I guess is the best way to say it. Yeah, and there was this Atlas Obscura article we both read about human feces, about coprolite, and the study of it. I think it was something like to know ancient civilization, you have to study its feces or something along those lines. To truly know an ancient society, one must analyze its feces.

Right, and it gives an example of this one archeologist who was working back in the 60s and is working today. And back in the 60s, when they would find coprolite, they would be like, oh, this is interesting. And then they'd use it for like flying disc contests at lunch, right? Do you believe it? This is like, this is not that long ago

that archeologists were doing this. And today it's like, you find coprolite, you bag it separately from the other coprolite found, it's going back for genetic analysis. You take half of the sample and preserve it so that you can use it for later analysis when our tools become even more advanced. Like it's just been, it's just such a great example

of old school archeology and the new archeology that's coming up today. Yeah, like they're looking at it as, which is as it is, which is a legitimate, important find that can tell you a lot about a society instead of playing Frisbee baseball with it. I guess it's Frisbee football, right? Frisbee frulf, they're playing frulf with the poop.

Did you ever play that Frisbee golf? No. They have courses for that stuff. I know, I know they definitely do. I'm sure they did in Athens if they don't still. Well, in true Chuck form, I went so far as to buy a couple of different Frisbee golf Frisbees and never went. Oh, you never did, huh?

Nope. No. Nope, that's kind of my thing. Nothing beats sitting around when you're in college. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, it's a copper light. I mean, it took, I mean, it took from the 1960s until just recently, like even through the 80s and 90s,

it said that it was a pretty small field of people that took it seriously and other people were still, even in the 90s, like, eh, what are you studying poop for? And to be fair, at the time, especially like back in the 60s, as recently as like the 80s or 90s, I guess, like you were saying, we didn't have anything that we could do with the human poop.

Besides fall. Besides fall, yeah. There wasn't anything you could do. I mean, you could break it open and be like, oh, look, a corn seed. They were eating corn. That's about the best you could hope for, right? So there wasn't much you could do.

But even still, if you look at what we're doing with it today, which is preserving half of the sample for future analysis with better tools that haven't been invented yet, that definitely underscores a mentality that wasn't present before either, which is this is not the apex yet. We haven't reached the apex of science. Yeah.

I mean, nowadays they can rehydrate it. They can say, hey, there were parasites in this poop. And in fact, in all the poop of all these people that lived here, so perhaps that's what killed them. And they don't even have to have the stool sample. They can find, like I said, an ancient latrine and learn a lot from that. And it sounds kind of funny,

but you can learn a lot from this stuff. Well, I remember when I was writing the cannibalism article years back, finding like right around that time, they had found evidence of cannibalism from copper light. And they had done it really roundabout. They'd found some protein that is only found in human muscle. And they found it in the poop of some

Southwestern indigenous groups poop. And they think that it was the result of climate change because the climate had changed and people were starving and they engaged in cannibalism as a result. But that's a pretty sterling example of bioarchaeology in action. Yeah, this one guy, Pierce Mitchell from University of Cambridge, go, I don't know.

Go fighting chaplains. Fighting chaplains. He learned through studying fecal matter that King Richard III had roundworm. Yeah. So, you know. That's great man, his geography then. Sure.

Boo. Who cares? All right, so what, man, I didn't expect to go right into poop, but there we did it. Well, let's talk teeth. Let's go from poop to teeth, you know, the standard. Yeah, teeth are a big marker.

Like if they dug me up one day, they would say, well, this gentleman had at least two bad teeth because the only thing left. And I had a brief conversation with the very famous Mike Rowe just kind of weirdly had a conversation with him one day about my implants. And he said, oh, you have those implants.

And he went, well, just know in a thousand years that'll be the only thing left of you. Right. So that's kind of good to know. Sure, yeah, they'll be like, obviously, this person was of higher social status because he had implants, yeah. Had at least dental insurance.

He was probably venerated. And bury me with my flippers is all I'm gonna say too. Right. So what they could find out from teeth or can find out maybe if the children suffered from malnutrition. Well, there's a whole thing where when you are malnourished as a child,

your teeth form these little lines in them as the development is kind of stunted and they stay there for life, even if you manage to become nourished and survive, right? So they can tell what your diet was like as a child from just looking at your teeth. Well, and can also tell, I guess, when I was talking about how society

may have overcome something, maybe they were close to death and overcame disease to end up thriving, but they still had those lines. And the teeth. Right, exactly. They can also tell from teeth, if you crush teeth up and powder them and run them through a mass spectrometer,

there's some pretty neat stuff you can do with that actually. When you're a little kid and you start eating and drinking the local water, there's something called strontium. And it's a stable isotope that's found in the bedrock of your area. And it's specific to your area. Your region.

It's pretty localized, right? Yeah. The type of strontium isotope that's gonna be where you live. And when rainwater filters through the bedrock into groundwater and then comes back out and it's taken up by plants and enters the water supply, and then your mom eats that plant and then breast feeds you,

those strontium isotopes get transferred to you and they get locked into your teeth for life, right? So where you're born can be isolated by using a mass spectrometer to find what strontium isotopes are in your teeth. That can be done whether you lived 50,000 years ago or we're born yesterday, either way. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, I feel like we've talked about that before. There's no way we haven't, right? Yeah, like something about the water that you drank as a child. Yeah, that would be it. Yeah, totally. Right, so you're taking in strontium isotopes and you've got those embedded in your teeth.

You also get different kinds of isotopes as well, strontium, lead, oxygen, they all have stable isotopes that get embedded into your skeleton, whether it's your teeth or your bones. But the stuff in your teeth from when you're young stays in there, it's permanently locked in. But the stuff in your bones, remember we did like, does the body replace itself every seven or eight years?

Since your skeleton replaces itself pretty on a pretty regular basis, the strontium and the isotopes that are found in your bones later in life are going to be a marker of where you lived close to your death, right? So if the strontium isotopes in your teeth are different from the strontium isotopes in your bone, well, a bioarchaeologist is going to say,

this person migrated, where did they come from? Why did they migrate? Why were they buried with all these great grave goods? Did they come from a different culture and basically end up becoming venerated in this new culture where they're like a high priest or what's the deal? Where did this person come from?

That's amazing. Yeah, and that's just kind of laying the groundwork now that we might not have the technology to say, oh, well, this is where he came from. We don't have the interpretation yet to say this is where they came from and this is what happened when they arrived. But we can create raw data from that

for successive generations of archeologists to look at and use to include it into a better understanding of the population they're examining. Yeah, and with the mass spectrometer, which we've talked about in other shows too, they do something called stable isotope analysis in terms of also finding out what people ate. If there's a difference in molecular weight,

like the ratio of heavy to light particles, they can determine whether someone consumed more carbon or more nitrogen in their lifetime. If they have a lot of nitrogen, maybe they ate a lot of meat or most likely ate a lot of meat. Or they just ate handfuls of nitrogen. Maybe so.

Nice nitrogen fields to come across. If they have a high ratio of the carbon, maybe they ate a lot of corn or I guess maize and sorghum. That's such a great word. Sure it is. Low carbon. It's an old timey word. Like anytime I hear sorghum, I immediately think overalls.

Yeah, me too. Yeah. Low ratio of carbon isotopes might mean they ate more potatoes and wheat and stuff like that. So it's just amazing that science has gotten to this point. You can dig up a bone, find out where someone was from, where they died and what they ate largely in their life.

Yeah. And again, you're putting it in context with where you're finding this. Yeah, that's already the story that's already there. Exactly. Because people, if you bury somebody with something, that says a lot. Just as much as what your bones say about how you lived,

I saw somebody say the way that you're treated in death by the people who you're survived by, that says quite a bit as well. So the type of burial, the way that your grave was marked, says a lot about not just you and how you were treated, but also what the society was found important. That's true, because you can ask for whatever you want in your burial, but someone's got to feel good enough

about you to carry that out, carry those dishes out. They might be like, I want to keep this wooden phallus. I don't want you to be buried with it. Did you see that thing, those mummies that were discovered in China? No, I think so. These ones Hobby Lobby took? No, I think that was Middle Eastern artifacts

that Hobby Lobby had, which I don't know anything about that, do you? I read briefly, after I saw the words Hobby Lobby, I got very bored. What were they doing with that stuff? I don't know, it's very unknown. It's bizarre. I mean, maybe they were collectors.

I maybe, or they were going to turn it into a line of tasteful home decor. Probably so. Well, there was a group of mummies found that belonged to an unnamed population that lived about 4,000 years ago in an autonomous part of China that's now a desert. It's called the Teclimacan Desert.

I'm sure I got that 100% right. But the area of the district that they were found near is called the Shohu Ju District. The mummies are just incredibly well preserved, so much so that their hair is totally intact. They were buried with these felt hats and fur line boots that are totally intact. I think one of them had like a feather in their cap

that was intact, like the preservation is just unheard of. And one of them is so well preserved that she's called the beauty of Shohu Ju, right? Where she's just kind of good looking as far as mummies go. Like, go look her up, don't think I'm a weirdo. You'll feel odd about this after you see her yourself, right? What was the name again? The beauty of Shohu Ju.

So it's not at all pronounced like that, but just type in beauty mummy China or something like that. And it will definitely bring it up. But this unknown group, they would bury their dead with fallacies or vulvas. They were buried with like 13 foot fallacies sticking out of like their graves. They were really into sex for one reason or another, right?

And the hats that they were buried in were found in burials in the area 2,000 years later. And so this unknown group that no one has any idea what they were like or what they were into aside from they were super sexy, right? They think that they know what language they spoke because the group that had similar hats 2,000 years later was known to speak this one lost language.

And it was more related to Latin than say like Central Asian, which doesn't really make sense until you find out that some of these mummies actually had red hair in European features. And they think that they were a pastoral group that basically herded their cows all the way from Western Europe over to the deserts of central China. Wow.

Isn't that astounding? Yeah, holy cow. Yeah, but again, bioarchaeology. All right, well, let's take another break here. We'll talk a little bit about DNA and a little bit about how Hobby Lobby kind of figures into this in a way. Okay.

Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

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All right. So we've talked about mass spectrometers. Talked about good old fashioned tooth scraping. Good looking mummies. Talked about the sexiest mummies in history. Right. I'm sure that's it. There's a top 10 list on the internet somewhere.

I'm telling you, you'll be like, oh, there's number one. I got to see this. So I guess DNA is sort of the next place to go. They've been using DNA in archaeology for a while, obviously, since the advent of DNA. They've been trying to apply it. But they use it as much as they can now, ancient DNA. Because obviously, with DNA, you can

find out all kinds of things from relatedness to other individuals within a population, marriage patterns, maybe. And obviously, just something is, I mean, they can tell largely from the bones what kind of sex of an individual. But DNA is the shoe in. Yeah, supposedly, even if you are

sexing an individual by the bone structure, it's still an educated guess. It's not definitive. It's DNA that's the only definitive way to say, this is a man or this is a woman. Yeah, it could have been a man with a very dainty frame. So the mummy is called the beauty of X-I-A-O-H-E, which, believe it or not, is shohuji.

Yeah. Shohuji. How's my Chinese? That was pretty good, actually. Thanks, man. I actually, I'm going the extra step these days in looking up pronunciations and then practicing, which is the second step.

What word was it that shamed you into doing that? Oh, there's been so many. Yeah. I can't bring any to mind. I think I blocked them out to keep any level of self-respect. But there have been plenty as you're well aware. Can you think of one?

No. OK. Nothing recently. I'm sure everyone will let us know on the internet. Oh, I just found the mummy. Yeah. Am I right or what? That's a good looking mummy.

Well, I don't know. It's a little weird to say. It is. But I think when you approach it from like a, wow, that's a mummy. I can't believe how well preserved it is. Yeah. It's a place. Instead of like a mummy.

Yeah. Although, hey, man, to each his own. Does that extend to that? Yeah, sure. All right. What else about DNA? Lineages, obviously. It's a very big deal.

Well, yeah, you can find a group of a group burial or basically a cemetery. Yeah. And now bioarchaeologists just like to show off by showing who's related to whom. Yeah. Just by saying, well, let's look at their genes, their DNA. Sure.

Which is pretty neat. Yeah. And as a whole, if you look at a cemetery, I mean, finding an individual is great. But when archaeologists can uncover a burial ground, that's when they really kind of lick their chops. Because they can learn a lot about the hierarchy of the society, what different ones of them ate.

Like you said, if they migrated, maybe they were from somewhere else where were they born. Right. Which says a lot about a population if they took in people from other societies. Yeah, I know. It's a great point. So just killing them right away.

That's a great point, actually. Yeah. And that actually gives a pretty good example of the social hierarchy thing. That gives a good example of bioarchaeology. Whereas before, you would find a grave. And this one had a marker. And the person was buried with a lot of cool stuff.

And then it's next to a grave. Or there's a grave nearby that isn't really buried with as much stuff. So you would say, well, this person was obviously venerated. And this was a socially unequal society. Right. And it's a pretty good guess. You're probably right.

But what bioarchaeology does now is they take that surmising. And then they say, OK, well, this person had a diet that was rich in meat. And this person ate nothing but vegetables. So the rich in meat person who had the nicer grave was probably richer. And let's look at their bones. Oh, well, their bones are less dense,

which would indicate they had not engaged in hard labor during their lifetime. Whereas this other person's bones are very dense, which meant that they probably did engage in hard labor. And so you start putting all this stuff together. And you're backing up the surmise that you made about the social strata or stratigraphy. Yes.

You know what I'm saying? Sure. I'm glad at least one person does. And you're basically backing it up rather than just jumping to conclusions and leaving it at that. Yeah, it's a much more firm science, for sure. Yeah.

So I kind of teased before the break that Javi Laby kind of plays a part. But I was referencing, in general, when any time we talk about archaeology, there's a certain amount of controversy involved. Because what you're inherently doing is disturbing ancient graves in almost all cases, unless there are no humans there.

But there's going to be some controversy within that. Some people think you shouldn't do it at all. Yeah. And then other people have come along the way to at least kind of give a framework of how best to do this, best practices. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, in 1970 adopted a convention

called The Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. That's a mouthful. It is a mouthful. But basically what it says is try not to let happen, which is what Javi Laby did, which is obviously pay for a cultural object that

didn't belong to your people. Right, right. Or you individually. And right, that's the key. Even if it's somebody who is a member of, say, like the tribe that that artifact comes from, that skeleton comes from, there's something called cultural patrimony, which

is that that is an object that belongs to the tribe as a whole. And no individual, including an individual from that tribe, can claim ownership over it or over the tribe, right? Yeah. So if the tribe says, no, that's ours, the tribe wins, that individual doesn't. Yeah, and there's been a really big, and I know we talked about this on other episodes,

but there's been a really big push in the past 10 years, but really in the past, like, 20, 25 years for repatriation of these cultural items here in the US. And I think in 1990, they. Yeah, George H.W. Bush. Yeah, they passed a legislation called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, NAGPRA. Sure.

Yeah, why not? Not as catchy as UNESCO. That's a good one. No. But, you know, like I said, the idea is that you just can't come in here and steal such a harsh word, but that's kind of what it is. But it's Grave Rob?

Yeah, it's really tough. I think Grave Robbing, we did one on that, right, as a whole? Yeah, I remember that one audience member in London called me out and was like, are you saying my parents are Grave Robbers, because they're both archaeologists? And I was like, why aren't they? Of course, that was our live topic. I said some people would say that for sure.

I do remember that. Yeah. There's a little bit of like pushback, though, in some cases, because sometimes they end up having to rely on oral history. And I think that the cynics are saying, well, you know, how do we know? They're just saying this stuff.

Yeah, that's. Was passed down orally, like show it to me in writing. Right, and they're like, we didn't have writing. We didn't have an alphabet, dude. Or you might have to negotiate with a religious leader. And then another jerk might come along and say, oh, wait a minute, these are their religious beliefs, and this is federal law.

Like, we have to keep those things separate. Yeah. So I mean, those are all very cynical viewpoints. I think generally, bioarchaeologists try as much as possible to work with the local people or the indigenous people and say, hey, this is your stuff. Let us uncover some of your secrets here. Right.

Unless they're like, no, don't we? We don't want the secrets out. Right, right. But they try to have a good working relationship with the indigenous people. Well, that's the best way to go forward on it. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah.

Like, I would think, I mean, you never know. I'm not going to, obviously, what's important to one Native American tribe might be different for another. But I would think, a lot of times, they might want some of the stuff highlighted and even put on display as long as it's a temporary thing and they can get it back. Yeah, I think it also depends on the context.

Like, the turn of the last century was really rife with. I mean, you really can't call it anything much more than academically sanctioned grave robbing, where universities of prestigiousness would send off basically guys who amounted to adventurers to go locate graves and loot them and bring them back for the universities to widen their prestige with these collections, right?

Or for the crown. Sure. And then if for decades, you said, hey, give that back. That was taken by anyone's definition illegally. And the university's like, oh, sorry, no. You're going to be upset about that. Whereas if the person says, well, oh, yes, of course. Let's get this back to you.

Can we do this analysis on it first and then get it back to you? Or if you discover something, you say, hey, we need to hold a meeting with this local indigenous population saying we found a grave site. We'd really like to excavate it, but it's up to them whether we do or not. You're probably going to get a lot better reception than you would if you just rolled right over their wishes

and didn't take them into consideration at all. Well, there's a saying here in the South, Josh, that you've probably heard, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Right. So true. It's always been my approach. Yep.

That's why there's always plenty of honey at all of these local meetings of indigenous people when the bioarchaeologists show up. You know, they're digging that this is a, I just learned this today. They're exhuming Salvador Dalí. Yeah. Did you see that?

A paternity test? Yeah. They're... Jerry Springer's behind us? Officially. No, he's not. Is he? No.

It wouldn't surprise me. No, it wouldn't me either. Officials in Spain are going to break into his tomb, get a DNA sample, and see if this lady, this woman, Pilar Abel is, in fact, his daughter. It's a good name, Pilar. She's a fortune teller. Oh, yeah?

She's a little wacky. Well, apparently, her claim's legit enough that they're digging the guy up. Yeah. Holly, from Stuff You Missed in History class, now we're talking about this, and I hadn't heard about it yet, and she was telling me about it. She was like, oh, this lady's, she's a piece of work, man. She's wacky.

I was like, well, she probably just waltzed into court, and knowing anything about Salvador Dalí, the judge was like, yeah, maybe we should look into this. Right, yeah. There's two of the great odd figures, or at least one. Yeah. I like how you just exposed Holly to a lawsuit from this lady. By saying she was a wacky.

Wacky? She is wacky. I quote, Holly Fry said wacky. And, of course, his family's, the Salvador Dalí Foundation is fighting it, but it's going forward. Keep him buried? Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting when...

It seems a little sentimental for Salvador Dalí. He doesn't seem to fit his character, you know? Like, I'm sure he'd be like, whoa, all right, let's get it going. Yeah. Dig me up. Dig me up and bury me with the world's best-looking mummy. She said it's not about the dough, so we'll see. It's about the money.

Yeah, we'll see about that. It's like tens of millions of dollars at stake here, easy. Oh, so she has a claim on his estate is what it is, huh? Well... That also explains why the foundation doesn't want her to get involved. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Like, if he fathered a child, she is his rightful heir because he didn't have any kids.

I got you. I always could feel, I always have mixed feelings about that stuff. How so? Well, I mean, on one hand, it seems like, Jesus, person coming along and like trying to get some of this money, but then on the other hand, it's like, well, yeah, but that's... If that's his daughter that he never cared for. Yeah. I mean, I definitely end up siding with the fact that it is family in the end, but it

feels a little icky sometimes, too. Well, yeah, I mean, you're digging up a body, you're digging up a body so you can make a claim on money, whether it is about that or not, it's definitely involved, but I also feel like there's a certain amount of reverence for the dead body where it's kind of like, no, if you fathered an illegitimate child in life, just because he died doesn't really get him off the hook from that. From whatever consequence that might be, even in death, I don't know. I hadn't really considered it until now, but I guess it is just kind of a icky thing overall,

but it's also, it's just a dead body, you know what I mean? Sure. It's a dead body. I don't care. Yeah. I'm not too precious about my remains. That's good to know because I'm going to dig you up based on that. Good.

Make me into a bunch of soccer balls. All right. Just kick me around the world. That'd be great, man. What a great idea. So Chuck, let's wrap it up talking about why this kind of stuff is important. I think we've hit on it here or there, like explaining the history of a society from the common people rather than just the leadership gives a better idea of the society.

That's definitely one thing. Oh, for sure. But also I think that bioarchaeology is kind of tasked itself with using the past, getting a clearer picture of the past to explain the present or predict the near future. You know, like one thing that a lot of people are trying to figure out is are humans inherently violent and one way you could kind of provide evidence for that case is were we violent in the past? Yeah.

And I think we even did an entire episode on that one that was pretty great about whether humans have always been violent. And I think that's one thing that bioarchaeologists are trying to solve is finding evidence of violence or an evidence of a lack of violence in a society that happened before. In other words, big one is climate change and how humans have responded to that in the past. Right. And what we might can do about it in the future.

Exactly. But that learning. Yep. And then there's just something to be said about, you know, getting bones out of a grave. There's nothing more satisfying than that. Put them in a bag, throw in the bag over your shoulder and walk them back to the lab whistling as you do. That's right.

The job well done. You got anything else? I got nothing else, sir. Okay. Well, I'm sure bioarchaeology will have plenty more for us to talk about in the future, so maybe we'll revisit it. In the meantime, you can type that word bioarchaeology into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com and since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this what was in the subject line, which is, am I an a-hole? Except she really said the word. Yeah, I know. This is from Mikayla. And I always like these that kind of pose a question to us, so this one does that. Here's what went down, guys. As a recent conversation with my boyfriend, I stopped at a stop sign at the same time as a car coming from the opposite direction who had a turn signal on.

I was going straight. The guy and I both waved for the other to go ahead first, got a little awkward, but that's not the important part. My boyfriend said he notices that it's usually men who do the wave to usher people at stop signs and he thinks it's just them trying to be controlling and that they are probably jerks. I wave people through all the time just trying to be nice and help them get where they're going a little bit faster without worrying about who should technically go first.

So I've always assumed that when people do the wave at me, it's because they're trying to be nice. So my questions to you all are, how do you perceive the wave? Am I controlling a-hole? Is this how my boyfriend perceives the wave? Is he a controlling a-hole? If he sees it that way, and should I stop doing the wave? And that's for Makayla.

She said, thanks. I'll be seeing you in Lawrence, Kansas in a couple of months. I've been spreading the good word. Often. Thank you. So Josh, what are your thoughts on the wave? When I am, I very infrequently wave. You just go.

No, I guess that's not true. I don't actually wave. I do the, you know, where you like present with your hand, your palm up, and then you kind of move it to one side like, oh, please, after you. Sure. Yeah. That's what I do, which I just realized is a form of the wave. And I do that sometimes, but I guess the only time I would do it is when it's not obviously

clear who's supposed to go. So I tend to just ask the other person to go ahead and, please, after you, right? I don't think of that as being controlling, but that's exactly what I'm doing is taking control of the situation, but I'm doing it- But not in a jerky way. Not trying. Yeah. To me, just not even giving a second thought and just basically pushing through ahead of

somebody who may or may not justifiably should have gone first. That's the jerky move to me. I think it goes both ways. It just depends on your perception of the world. Do you hate people? If so, then you probably find the way to be controlling and jerky. What about you? All right.

So my four-way stop sign deal is very deep. It's a very big thing in my life. Lay it on me. Well, I've got a lot of thoughts on this. First of all, the worst people in society are people who mistreat children, animals, and elderly. And then right behind them are people that just run right through a stop sign because they just know, like, I don't want to be bothered.

Yeah, well, they could mistreat children, animals, and the elderly with the front end of their car like that too. So those are awful people. As far as the wave, I tend to just- I tend to try and let someone else go first, but I'm also kind of impatient, so you've just got a moment. If you just sit there and dawdle after I wave, I'll either get aggressive with my wave and then kind of look like a jerk, or I'll just go and be like, you know, you had your chance. Yeah, I do the I just go where I'm like, all right, see you in hell.

And then the other thing that really bugs me about stop signs lately, I've noticed, is there's a growing segment of society that seems to think like it doesn't matter who arrived first is just like, I feel like I've been waiting long enough. Yeah, you can't do that. Like a heavily trafficked four-way stop. You may be the fourth and I'm sorry that you feel like you've been sitting there too long, but if you were the fourth one to come to a complete stop, then you've got to let the other three go, not just like, I think they treat it like, hey, I stopped and now I'm

going. Now, now, there's a sub- there's a sub-discipline to that Chuck, right? Where if somebody is going straight and you're going straight in the other way, you can go straight right then and just use up a turn simultaneously. It actually keeps things going faster. It's not at all rude. Somebody might be like, hey, wait a minute, but if they stop and think for even half of a second, they'll see that you actually did them a favor.

So that is okay as long as you're not trying it while somebody's turning left in front of you. Yeah. And there's also the thing that bugs me is when two people stop facing each other and you both go to go at the same time because you think we're both going straight and they go to turn into you and like, honk at you. Yeah. And I'm like, dude, let me know which way you're going.

Yeah. I probably would have let you go anyway. Right. But I thought you were going straight. Got to use that blinker. You'll get a finger if you don't use the blinker. Whoa. Not by me.

I'm just saying some people. So anyway, I think out of all the traffic things, even including like highway merging, the four-way stop sign intersection is my most troublesome and frustrating part of driving for me. Yeah. That's number one. Well, now everybody knows. So look out for Chuck.

All right. Yeah. This is Michaela that brought all this up. Yeah. Michaela, I hope we explain that. I don't think that means you're a controlling jerk and I don't think that means your boyfriend is because he thinks that is what it means either. Yeah, maybe you guys should just find some other topics to discuss.

Yes, but Michaela, I do think you're with the wrong guy overall though. Oh, man. Poor guy. Okay. Wow. I can't believe we're ending it like that. But if you want to get in touch with us like Michaela did, then you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast.

You can hang out with me on Twitter at Josh Clark. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant or slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.